New EPA West boss is a science denier

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FILE – In this May 21, 2015, file photo, workers prepare an oil containment boom at Refugio State Beach, north of Goleta, Calif. The shutdown of a pipeline that spilled up to 101,000 gallons of crude on the Santa Barbara coast forced Exxon Mobil Corp. to halt operations at three offshore platforms because it couldn’t deliver oil to refineries, the company said Tuesday, June 23. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)

In a better world, this would be good news: The guy who will be running the local branch of the federal Environmental Protection Agency has strong Southern California ties, being from green-friendly Santa Barbara, where he formerly served on the county Board of Supervisors.

So in that alternate universe, since he would know the lay of the land — the battles won and the ones still being fought for cleaner air and water in our neck of the woods, the ongoing efforts to keep our coastline safe — he would be on the side of the Lord. Protecting the environment, don’t you know, which is the job.

Problem is, the guy who will serve in that crucial post in the actual world — Trumpworld — is an anti-environmentalist nut job who doesn’t believe in science (he’s a climate-change denier) or our country’s democratic process (the Santa Barbara Independent says he’s the Trump delegate who first started chanting, about Hillary Clinton, “Lock her up!” from the GOP convention floor. Before this president, that was a sentiment reserved to Eastern Bloc, fascist and banana-republic regimes.)

Mike Stoker not only doesn’t have any environmental knowledge or credentials — he until recently was the spokesman for Greka Oil & Gas, the scandal-plagued little petroleum company that in 2011 agreed to pay $2 million to settle legal claims from Santa Barbara County after multiple onshore oil spills occurred because it failed to adequately maintain its pipelines, drilling rigs and storage facilities.

And this is the guy who is now the boss of the EPA Region 9 office, based in San Francisco, overseeing air pollution fines against oil refineries, clean drinking water and wetlands permits for developers in California, Arizona, Hawaii, Nevada and the Pacific Islands.

Except that, in a remarkable show of hubris, Stoker is declining to move to the Bay Area, where his office and its 700 employees is, instead demanding to run the enviro show from down here. Good on Sen. Dianne Feinstein for firing off a note to Stoker’s despicable boss, EPA head Scott Pruitt, asking how Stoker would be able to function as an “absentee” EPA director for the West Coast and what it would cost taxpayers for regular flights and other expenses.

But the word is, according to our San Jose Mercury News colleague Paul Rogers, that the administration was having a tough time filling the West Coast job, since finding someone with an actual interest in environmental quality who would also show fealty to a president who doesn’t care about that was hard. Since no one could be found who fit the bill, Stoker was hired instead.

Basically, he needed a job. “He’s a talented congenial opportunist. He was a Reagan Republican; he was a Newt Gingrich Republican; now he’s a Trump Republican,” said Santa Barbara Independent editor Nick Welsh, who has covered Stoker for three decades, according to the website E&E News.

Here in California, with the Pacific Ocean rising, rainfall levels falling and record-setting wildfires burning, we take the reality of human-caused climate change seriously. Except for a few eccentrics who make up their own facts, we believe the 97 percent of climate scientists who say that fossil fuels are the problem. Stoker pretends that there has been a two-year cooling trend, as well as saying the science isn’t settled. He’s wrong. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data shows April was the 400th consecutive month with temperatures above the 20th-century average. December 1984 was the last month the planet had below-average temperatures. Same asylum, different lunatic.